SAP Business One Product Roadmap

On February 21st 2014, SAP Business One released its first version of the Q1 2014 SAP Business One Roadmap with features and benefits mapped out to 2018. Though not yet available to the public, it presents SAP customers and partners with a clear vision of where the product is headed in 2014 and beyond with its newest versions, SAP Business One 9.0 and SAP Business One powered by SAP HANA (B1H & B1A).

Over the years, technology companies have been historically reticent to issue public statements surrounding the functionality that is coming in the next major and even minor releases of their products. This is understandable, given the competitive nature of the software marketplace. Unfortunately, it also means that customers are often times left in the dark, subject only to whispers in the market and verbal assurances from their account representatives. SAP Business One, its customers and its partners don’t have these problems.

SAP Business One’s last roadmap, made public in May of 2013, promised a new major version upgrade from version 8.82 to version 9.0, which was released for GA (General Availability) to the market in mid-2013. This new version included vast improvements in warehousing, mobility, business intelligence product support, and most notably, In-Memory (HANA) database technology that would revolutionize the speed at which emerging enterprises could transact and access critical business information.

While the details of what 2014 has to offer SAP Business One clients are still in the hands of existing SAP Customers and Partner Community, improvements and enhancements to version 9.0 are certainly on the horizon. SAP continues to add dashboards (KPI’s) to their existing solution set, to provide innovative views of the system data, tailored to more user types in their system. Expansion of their mobility applications (which now include the Android O.S.) will make SAP Business One more accessible to more people in their user community as new features and functions are added.

In addition, SAP Business One powered by SAP HANA will continue to advance in these same areas, while being able to provide more features and functionality, given the speed and accessibility of data in the In-Memory environment. Expansion of their “Extreme Apps” will continue, as users begin to realize the potential of having enterprise level computing power in the hands of emerging organizations.